Impact through Practice

Impact comes with practise... this is true in sport and it's also true with number facts. The 2016 National Curriculum set ambitious number fact targets by requiring all 12x tables to be memorised by year 4 (reduced from year 6). When faced with this challenge, Caddington Village School decided to focus it's attention on year 2 where times table learning begins. This began with a year-long deployment of Number.fy and the results were nothing short of astonishing.

The best way to demonstrate this is to look at the three graphs below. The data show how many individual times table questions were answered by the class, playing daily for a period of approximately 15 minutes.

Graph 1: this shows the first full week of school: 2340 questions, 61% correct almost all the 1s and 2s.

Graph 2: this shows a full week at the end of the Autumn term (December) and here we see a dramatic improvement - 4088 questions answered, 88% correct and now 1s, 2s, 4s, 5s and 10s, with a smattering of the other times tables (the class had answered 51,000 questions by this point!).

Graph 3: the final graph shows a full week in the middle of the summer term (June) with 7144 questions answered, 92% correct and now a good number of 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s and 12s (170,000 questions answered by this point!!!!).

As a reminder, the National Curriculum requires Year 2 children to know their 2s, 5s and 10 times tables. In terms of individual successes - 65% of the class now consistently know all their 1-12x tables.

These results show dramatic IMPACT. There is clearly increased knowledge, increased accuracy and increased speed resulting in a dramatic increase in achievement and a massive boost in pupil confidence, which will provide the perfect springboard for future mathematical learning. All of this for 15 minutes per day, without any marking and with huge amounts of fun and enthusiasm.

(we are grateful to Richard Kingham and all the children in 2K for their hard work and enthusiasm over the year)